Spent 3 hours chasing a rear derailleur ghost in my own shop

I was indexing a 10 speed rear derailleur last Tuesday at my bench in Oakland and could not get the shifting clean no matter what I did to the barrel adjuster. After 3 hours of fiddling I stepped back and noticed the derailleur hanger was bent, which I should have checked in the first 30 seconds like a rookie. I'd been adjusting cable tension to compensate for a bent hanger the whole time, which is why every tweak made another gear worse. Now I check hanger alignment with my DAG tool before I touch a single barrel adjuster. How many of you learned this lesson the hard way too?

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the_mila13d ago

Did you also spend a while staring at the cable and wondering if the housing was the problem? I did the same thing on a customer's bike last year, kept cranking the barrel adjuster and making it worse with every turn. It was a bent hanger too, and I felt like such an idiot because the tool was right there on the wall the whole time. Three hours of my life gone just because I skipped one check. Now the hanger gets checked first, no matter what the bike is doing. That lesson sticks with you forever once it burns you like that.

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